CCDN 331 Project 4: Manifesto DRAFT 1

Design Manifesto

Jay Tapp

“Looking & Seeing”

Design school is hard. Media design school is especially hard because we are so confined to following the brief. There are few, if any cases absolutes as you go through media design. Much of design education is about learning key techniques and skills and then trying to apply them to your work in interesting and innovative ways. However, many of the design skills we have learnt leading up to these university years are somewhat, left behind. One of which for myself, is the importance of craft, more specifically painting.

Now you may ask, why are you doing a Media design major if you’re so into your craft? Why not do a Fine Arts major instead? Well, Easy. For me, it’s not about what major you are doing; I could be doing a psychology major and still enjoy my craft. In my opinion, basic craft is what we should all know and love, regardless of our various skills. It’s something that we have all grown up with, something that we have the ability to do. 

So now you’re asking why craft is so important to me? It’s important to me because I feel it’s something we have abandoned as designers, especially in Media design. We are confined to briefs and being stuck in front of the computer screens all day that we forget the different interactions we get when we are doing such activities like painting. I have analysed this further and thought about the differences between creating a digital painting and a physical painting, which has lead me to the title of this manifesto which is “Looking & Seeing”. I’ll leave you with this quote that I think is suitable to start my main argument:

“Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as model-making put the designer into a haptic contact with the object or space.“ (Pallasmaa, pg 12).

The computer is usually seen as a solely beneficial invention, which facilitates efficient design work. I express my serious concern in this respect, at least considering the current role of the computer in the design process. To me, there is more value in physical paintings than digital paintings. Yes there are the facts that digital paintings allow you to erase and save and print as many copies as you could ever imagine. But when you only have 1 chance to do it right, and 1 copy of something that you’ve put time and effort in creating, wouldn’t you think that is worth more than something you can go back and edit later and that anyone could get their hands on?

One thing that interested me that Pallasmaa said was the haptic contact or experience you get when it comes to the processes of digital creation and physical creation. I think about what I feel when I’m creating something digitally for an assignment. I have to go through the process of learning the program, I need a lot of concentration, it’s very intense and I feel very close-minded when I’m creating something for a brief. On the other hand, when I’m painting, I feel mostly relaxed. I can listen to music at the same time and I’m yet still open-minded. I get a sense of enjoyment and nostalgia, and most importantly I can create for myself. You rarely get any of those experiences when it comes to being on the computer.

Pallasmaa, J. (1996). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. 

John Wiley & Sons, 2013 

Goldstein, M. (2010). A Design Education Manifesto
Retrieved from http://designcrit.com/mfa/design-education-manifesto